980 Park, a fictional, pre-war co-op on the Northwest corner of Park Avenue and 83rd Street, houses the rich and famous-Sidney Sapphire, the blonde anchorwoman of ABC News, Angela Somoza, the gorgeous Nicaraguan jet-setter, Bob Horowitz, the former chairman of the United Jewish Appeals, and the usual collection of banking and industrial CEO's, Wall Street magnates, and white-haired philanthropists. The Brooklyn-born doorman, Vinnie Ferretti, joins the ranks when he becomes a major fashion designer. The building's board, rich as clotted cream, sips gin in the afternoons and devises ways to keep out anyone deemed "inappropriate." Stifled resentments come to a head when the French baroness in the penthouse dies, and two Jewish families in the building suspect the co-op board of more discrimination with regard to prospective buyers than might be legal. Better Homes and Husbands is a stylish, richly woven novel about class and caste feuds, played out with ferocity and etiquette in a posh New York apartment building during the tumultuous period of social change between 1970 and 2000. "A sharply perceptive, highly entertaining, shrewdly compassionate book." -- Los Angeles Times "Leff's debut has all the elements of an Austenian novel of manners... Better Homes and Husbands focuses on one block of real estate -- 980 Park Avenue... The tenants are surprisingly likable; by the end, they're not only hobnobbing in each other's apartments, but have scrambled into position for the customary Victorian denouement: a constellation of couplings and the transfer of a large hunk of property." -- The Village Voice "'Devil'-caliber dirt from an author who grew up in 1040 Fifth Avenue, the cooperative where Jacqueline Onassis once lived... Leff does think and write about class, racism, anti-Semitism, and earnest (if unfashionable) emotions."-- Michael Gross for New York Post "With a sharp eye and a literary sense, Leff has etched a portrait that Edith Wharton would enjoy." -- The Beverly Hills Courier "Novels that center on the lifestyles of the rich and fabulous, if not famous, have received renewed appreciation lately.... In the middle of all this, there's a serious contender... Better Homes and Husbands." -- National Public Radio Valerie Ann Leff lives in Connecticut, where she teaches at the Westport Writers' Workshop. Better Homes and Husbands By Leff, Valerie Ann St. Martin's Griffin Copyright © 2005 Leff, Valerie Ann All right reserved. ISBN: 0312330634 The Building On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the budding is lime-stone and red brick, a heavy front door of black iron tracery, a gray canvas canopy with its white-lettered address, Nine-eighty Park Avenue . Here, wealthy New Yorkers occupy grand apartments with their children, cooks and maids. A super lives in the basement, managing doormen, handymen. Throughout the year, drivers in long shiny cars wait by the curb. Nannies push strollers to Central Park, and delivery boys bring gro-ceries around to the service entrance. There are dinner parties, guests, cocktails. Greetings exchanged in the lobby, gossip whispered in the back elevator. Over time, the building changes. Children grow up, go off to prep school, college. Or they flee, disappointing their par-ents. Residents die or sometimes move away. An apartment is vacant, and new families up the ante on multimillion-dollar bids and apply to the co-op board. Many are turned down. Families in the building interact-or they don't. Over time, they watch one another, perceive and misperceive, play out feuds of class and caste with ferocious etiquette. There are quiet revolutions, and the inhabitants of the building adjust-, some gladly, some with dismay. In 980 Park Avenue, during the last three decades of the twentieth century, stories have layered the walls of high--ceilinged apartments like coats of plaster, wallpaper, paint; voices linger like the scent of spices in the kitchen cabinets. A suicide, a strike, a seventeen-year-old girl pregnant. A scan-dalous arrest in the late 1980s. A lawsuit barely averted by the co-op board. No one knows the whole history, and the truth is understood in pieces by one resident or another, by a daugh-ter, a friend of the family, by a doorman. The truth is told in stories, in voices tinged with opinion, envy, regret. The truth is kept in the building, never completely revealed. The building is brick, mortar, limestone, lath and plaster. Plumbing and wires run through it. The building is also stories and lives, concurrent and overlapping. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the building, 980 Park Avenue, holds these stories within its walls, silent, like a book... i0 Claudia Bloom: Trader Vic's -1970- There used to be a hallway in the Plaza that led to Trader Vic's. You walked past creamy white doors with gilded moldings, crystal wall sconces, and turned right, down a flight of red--and-gold-carpeted stairs. Then, suddenly, you fou